by Sam Michel
He said “well” a lot.
I said, “Long time no see.”
He said, “Well.”
“You’re looking good,” I said.
He said, “Well.”
I said, “This is my son.”
And he said, “Well, well, well, I see.”
When I brought in Hope, placed her on the metal table, stiff, exploded, he saw well enough that she was dead.
“In my line,” says the vet, “at my age, seems like every man that ever owned a milk cow or an ass in Humbolt County’s got a son I see grow up from tricycles to pickups. Some sons get themselves another ass, some get dogs and kitties. The lot of them get sick. So far as I know, all Creation hasn’t got an animal that won’t come down with something sick enough to kill it.”
And what, he asked me, would I have him do for it? After he confirmed this dog here was a roadkill, what? After he confirmed she’d been a Schnauzer, what? Was she ours? he wondered. Because the only Schnauzer that he knew in town turned out to be our neighbor’s, a yellow-ribboned bitch, he said, named Hope.
“She might be carrying a litter,” said the vet. “I have heard the fellow own’s her, he was trying pretty hard to breed her. Name’s Frank. Echeveria. Lives in one of those jippo sort of boxy jobs, those they built out there on O Street? Course, if it’s my opinion you are wanting, I would say forget about another dog. Schnauzer, anyway. But if you are stuck on them as this other fellow, then you go over there and see him. Frank. O Street. Or P. Bitch’s name is Hope. Papered, AKC, the works. Bred her by a stud owned by a friend of mine. Dog named Gustavus’s Imperial—called Gus—just last week in Elko.”
Doubtless any father, having found himself in my shoes, would have seen the need to urge upon the vet a little more discretion. Son-of-a-bitch like that—soft, drawn, hewn of whiskered soap by sandstorms and putty knives, his clinician’s gaze at mortal sicknesses and breakage. I motioned with my head, suggesting our withdrawal. For the boy’s sake, I explained.
“It’s his birthday,” I was saying. “He’s distraught.”
The vet looked back to see what I believed distraught was, supposed I might be right. He drew his glasses from his pocket, asked me if he wasn’t seeing things, or was the boy’s one foot much bigger than the other. I told him what I could, as quickly as I could, about my son’s one foot, his speechlessness, his glasses and his teeth, his squarish shape, its probable origination in his mother. I told the vet that Hope was ours. Unthinkingly, I called her Faith. I omitted my unmended fence, supplied a teenaged driver. One minute, I explained, we were gathered in the front yard, all of us together, posing for our Christmas portrait, and the next thing there we were, in the gutter there with the dog, our faces in our hands, not knowing what to say or how to touch her. A wiser soul, I said, some sage was needed here whose gift it was to parse the breath and blood of tongueless beasts to tell the child how they had lived, when they had lived, what finished them, and why, and where the child might think of them as being bound to. I told the vet the boy was a believer. In the vet. I plunged ahead, confessed that I myself began to see the vet as something of a hero from the Westerns I recalled from youth, where our quiet, rural lives were proven indisputably to be the possible arenas for the drastically heroic.
Naturally, our life was not that movie. In our life, the vet conducted me a little farther from the boy and told me if it weren’t for the boy he would have showed me to the door by the direction of his boot. He said that I was spoiled, said my mother spoiled me, he’d seen it coming, guessed in any case that I was lying. He guessed we never had a dog at all, guessed that dog out there was Hope. Figured I must be my neighbor’s neighbor. Said he never trusted me. Guessed that it was me who burned the barn down. Saw it in the shine I kept up on my boots. Saw it in my bowtie. Allowed as how a child should not be given such a party. Asked me whether he, the vet, looked like any kind of man with sons and daughters in the world who turned to him to help explain it.
“No, sir,” said the vet, “I never bred because I was afraid I’d come out with the kind that you are. You tell that boy that you’re mistaken. On your way out, you read him that plaque on my door. Says Large Animals. You tell him what you’ve got there is a Small.”
So in our life, the movie version, my son and I are seen departing from the vet in search of other, older, more compliant, less encrusted heroes. I try to keep our chins up. I allow the dog to ride inside the car, in the backseat, with the boy, who strokes her through the Visqueen. I resume my banter, a tactic of apparently significant distraction. How a smaller animal is different from a larger, and why the vet appeared to be unkind, what the smell inside his office was, where I thought that we could find the nearest potty. In our movie, I look behind me oftener than I look out front. I ask the boy if he can feel the heat. I point out the gulls in the dump, ask him does he see the coming heavy weather. I tell him if he’s lucky, for his birthday, in addition to the dog, we might go get a collar. We might build a brand new fence, I say, an electric one, to keep the dog from bolting. I crack my window, tip my nostrils to the crack, tell my son that by the scent of things, as I recalled them, the Humane Society could not be far.
“The pound,” I said, meaning to rein in his expectations.
And yet when I had passed us by the place, and you saw that there was the renderer’s, and there was Lily Fong’s, you also saw that where the pound once was were heaps and heaps of weedy rubble. The pound, I said, the pound, as if the twisted steel and broken timbers might be moved by my insistence to assemble in the standing shapes through which I last recalled them. What else was I to say? The rubble, the rubble, the rubble? This was, I think, lament, the great misnaming, the mind’s displacement of the named thing from the present. Having come from so far off my chair, I felt myself entitled, to become a little bit untidy, nostalgic to myself, so far as speech went. The pound, what had they done to it? My wife, what would she do to me? Or to my chair? Could she destroy my chair, a whole recliner, with a cleaver? I had done my best. Lamentably, the pound was not a pound; the Roxy was not the Roxy; the public pool was not the public pool; Penny’s Five and Dime had just this year become a bank. On the other hand, I thought, why lament? A stranger to this lot might easily perceive a resource, raw material; here, perhaps, was the grounded image from the dreamscape of an avid sleeper. This lot might one day be a feedstore, or a supermarket, perhaps another Roxy.
Why weep?
It occurred to me I might not need a chair; it occurred to me that men were very likely sitting, unassisted by the chair, for countless, happily reposing generations prior to the chair’s conception. But where was repose? And who was happy? Here was failure, my tendency to loiter naiflike in its precincts. But I wasn’t any naif. I knew the thing to do was to get out of the car and knock. Bid the boy sit still. Not to worry. Run, knock, hurry back. Wife’s work, in our family, I don’t know why, but still I did it. Got out, I mean, chanced my stature as a knowing, potent husband, a native Winnemuccan. I took care to stride. I unpocketed my hands, let my arms swing in an arc I thought depicted best a purposeful insouciance. Had there been a stock of straw nearby I would have plucked it up and chewed it. Somebody watched. Who knew who? A renderer? My son? Did Lily Fong herself regard me through the sideslits of her paper shades? Even here, on the outskirts of our town, where the windows were few, the desert barren, I was not unmindful of how deeply my ablutions and deportment are descended from the wish and the fear that somebody might see me. Or that somebody might hear me. Or might smell me. Certainly, there have been those days when I was seated on a bench, or standing in an aisle, or maybe waiting in a line to buy my stamps, when suddenly my body clenched, seized inward from the region just below the buttocks, upward through the brain, recoiling from the possibility that somebody, somehow, might accidentally touch me. What would I betray? What could anybody know? By my skin, what? By my sound, what? What could be determined of me through the apprehension of my shape? I wondered: Would Lily Fong discer
n the bravery I intended to example by my lengthy gait? Would a renderer respect my knock, the hardy application of my ungloved knuckles to the frozen wood? And when he chose at last to speak, would my son recount my perseverance to my wife? my patience with the vet? my ingenuity with Visqueen?
As it happened, I was not to be rewarded with an answer to these questions. As for the renderer, I was thwarted first-off by the door. The door, I mean to say, was covered over with a quilt of padded leather. It was soft! Unknockable! Innocuous! I was made to ring a bell! My potency, paternity, my easy native pride: was it likely any audience would sense in my performance such enlargening virtues, once their final, manifesting act reduced to the circumference of a dime? I mean the button, the surface it required of the ringer and my fingertip to register the belltone? Having witnessed such an act, would anybody call it bravery? I asked myself: What if I should jab? Repeatedly? Or should I press just once, I wondered, firmly, or grindingly, perhaps, and grind until the hiree whose job it was to tend the door had seen enough of me to understand that here was the sort of man who, when it came to doorbells, ground them?
Well, I had not known how complicated it could be to get out of the car and ask. If I could not appear to be courageous, could I at least seem funny? Was there any way in which a father might arrange himself to indicate a threat? I thought along these lines of several of our younger Winnemuccans I had seen who waited on our bus. I recalled the predatory aspect they imparted through the rakish, feline deformations of their postures. I considered their apparel. Their sleeveless shirts. The extravagant display of volume in their trousers. I thought, too, of where they chose to pierce themselves, and the iconography I saw was needled on their forearms and their biceps. Those icons, what ethic is it they encode? And those trousers, what weaponry is stockpiled there? I myself, when I was young, had worn my trousers tight. I suppose I owe my wife, improbably, initially, to fashion. On her good days, typically those few directly prior to her menses, she likes to reminisce about the snugness of my trousers through the region of my groin, where I recall the denim used to bind, and chaff, and on a hot day caused me such discomfort as to render any sign I showed of menace more actual than act. No secrets, she explains, meaning what she saw was what she got. Which meant a certain length, of course, and girth, an estimate, at least, of the inflated, rigid version of the length and girth, based upon the flaccid, and also some idea of the groin’s unwholesomeness, the incubative possibilities the fashion of our day was prone to generate. The groin, like the lung, must breathe. It may be that the yeasts and cheeses some of us were growing in the sultry furrows of our privates were the milder predecessors of the knives and guns the current fashion lends to the imaginations of the youth who sponsor and adore it. Such excitement, says my wife, what a time it was to be at play in fields so reckless.
As for me, the fellow standing meanwhile at the threshold of the renderer’s, well, my trousers fit, I was not pierced, I doubted I might summon passion from a doorbell, I believe I understood that anybody watching should have seen a person capable of neither loving nor of killing, a man without commitment, unpostured, unfashioned, brownish-gray, submortal. Was this the thanks I got from God? Had I come from so far off my chair to learn that I was even less than what I had so dreaded? After having striven for so long to be so little, to owe so little from the little I’d become, I should have thought I would be glad to have the bell unanswered. Which means I must have not been glad but been unhappy, or if not unhappy, then certainly confused, and also not unlonely.
Surely I had seen a light in there; it was such a light which led me to infer an audience, after all, an audience which led me to infer a need to act, a need to act which led me to despair, and then to loneliness, once I was relieved from the necessity of acting. Unless I acted for myself. One always has one’s self, naturally, and his boy, of course, if one is me, though when I turned to see if he was watching, saw that I was likely standing several paces past the limits of his vision. For what portion of his life, I wondered then, had I stood at such a distance, performed at those removes from him where light diffused in shapes unhinged to meaning? In the early days, before I was ashamed to go about before him naked, I may have seemed to him to be a pallid bank of fog. A slim vapor. Had he seen through me? When I held him in my lap, an infant, milky-eyed and gazey, had I meant nothing more to him than clouds meant? A threatening of rain? Did he think somehow that I would pass? When he reached his hands up to my face, waved his fists at me and squealed and gurgled, had he meant to make a wind, some molecular disturbance that might hurry my dispersal? Was I so gray? Had I, through these intervening years, allowed myself to come as close to him as I must come, in order for the boy to really see me? Would he be forever reaching through my person to the sunshine?
No doubt, as my wife suggested, I am prone to give the boy a little too much credit. Nostalgic, sentimental, flighty—“in case I had forgotten”—what I needed was to be brought down to earth. Learn to swing a pick. Fix a fence. Eat some liver. Realistically, I knew the boy would probably have kept his eye throughout this time on Hope. Well, so, better on Hope than on me, I thought. I thought, A Buick. And, A forceps. I touched my fingers to my temples. I thought, Jesus, was it Doctor Root, or Doctor Sneely? By and by I thought to ring again, and again, until I thought I had exhausted every possibility for ringing. I jabbed, that is, and ground. I used my thumb enough to know that nothing in it could be funny. Then I tried the door itself. Locked. Surprisingly, I was not unpuzzled. The stink of the place—I mean the renderer’s—the smokebelch from the chimney stacks, the several cars I saw still parked out in the lot had led me to believe more strongly than the light alone that someone there was there. Whereas they were not. Or else they were deaf. Perhaps there was some aspect of the renderer’s occupation which either caused or favored deafness. Or perhaps the manager was deaf, and was moved by either sympathy or bitterness to hire only those few applicants whose handicaps were his, whose ability to hear, I mean to say, would not allow them to exceed him in the workplace. Then again, it could have been that nobody was deaf, but rather everybody had their ears corked, muffed, perhaps, in order to protect them from the roar and shriek of the machines I featured that a renderer might use to speed the rendering.
Really, how much did I know about this rendering? What was really being rendered? And from what? Myself, I featured peelers, cutters, trimmers, crushers. Pumps and vacuums, roiling vats of hide and bone and fat and gristle. Horses, cows, raccoons. Consumme? Candlesticks? Could it be that all this industry reduced itself to soap? Soap made sense to me. There was a logic to its being the residuum of stink and filth I could appreciate. Alchemy, a crucible, the purifying fires. And what of me, I got to thinking, and what about my mother? When it came my time, and I took her place, would the odors I exuded be the sign of fires burning from within me, the soul’s long purge of the corruptive body? were the stinking halls my mother walked the route we all must walk to purification? And Hope, I thought, unhuman, soulless, unrendered, what sort of purity could such a dog expect her stink to fetch her? What might a veterinarian have told a boy that seemed to me untellable to fathers? Well, I began to see the rudeness of these renderer’s more kindly, having thought myself to understand the gifts their labor might bestow on Winnemucca’s dead, as well as Winnemucca’s living. Perhaps they did not answer to the bell because they were afraid that somebody acquainted with their handicaps and muffs might kill and rob them from behind, plunge the knife into their spines and pick their pockets while they bent to work the meatsaw. Who could blame them? History recounts repeatedly how men possessed by lesser fears will fail to answer greater calls to help than mine was. From our last one-hundred years you may recall your Nazis and your Jews, your Armenians and Turks, you may drive your shiney duely through the Paiute reservation. Who knew why this thought should offer me such satisfaction? I felt relieved, at least, if not satisfied; I was grateful for the company I felt residing in the string of thoughts accruing to t
his last regarding history; I believe that I had thoroughly forgotten which thoughts they replaced; I mean those thoughts which in departing caused me for awhile to feel so lonely. Such a short while, really, such a shallow loneliness; in truth, in retrospect, I could kick myself for not allowing such a loneliness to deepen. Really, I thought, really. What kind of company resides in the remembered legacies of misanthropic forebears? Would I not have been better off alone? Could a person ever be sufficiently alone? Always, to my mind, there was too much to remember. The Humane Society, for instance, Lily Fong, the weather. All of them I had forgotten, briefly, and then again remembered, being moved unhappily by memory to leave the quilted, leather door behind me, and consider what might be before me, insofar as further action went.
What to do, what to do?
For starters, I unzipped my parka. Seemed to me the temperature had risen. Whereas the sky had lowered, was suggestive of that quality of cover which the aviator designates a ceiling. Low ceiling. Visibility about one mile. Winds calm. Barometric pressure twenty-nine-point-nine and falling. Storm weather. Advisories and warnings. Snow. Big snow, according to the weatherman, according to my wife; add another two or three degrees, I thought, and the ceiling would be opening in flakes. I could smell it, snow, a metallic odor, incisive, immanent, it cleaved and seemed to me to burn, electrically, a cleaner, silver burn I made out from the burning fat and hide and what I recognized, on coming closer up to Lily Fong’s, was burning garlic. An unctuous, brownish burn, thick and slippery, I was thinking, coated.
Naturally, I recalled I had not eaten yet, and had been hungry, more or less, since I had seen my wife prepare her liver. On the other hand, and also naturally, I was more or less not hungry. Rumors, the power of suggestion. I am ashamed to say that I am one among those native speculators who remark the motives for establishing a kitchen in the neighborhood of both the renderer’s and the pound. Sha Cha Kitty, Peking Lab, Terrier in Brown Sauce. Compose yourself, I told myself. I said, Don’t just stand there, you’re a big boy now, you’ve got money, it’s a business here, you’ve got a simple question, go right on in and order up and ask it.